Infrastructure Briefing — August 22, 2024

Executive briefing: Amazon will retire the rds-ca-2019 and rds-ca-rsa2048-g1 certificate authorities on 22 August 2024. Managed database fleets that have not installed the new rds-ca-rsa4096-g1 or rds-ca-ecc384-g1 roots will lose the ability to establish TLS connections once Amazon rotates the trust stores. Zeph Tech maps the rotation runbook—inventorying database endpoints, updating certificate bundles, and sequencing reboots—to keep regulated workloads online.

Key industry signals

Retirement deadline. AWS Security Bulletin RDS/Aurora certificate rotation sets 22 August 2024 as the date when 2019-era certificates are removed from AWS trust bundles for Amazon RDS, Aurora, DocumentDB, and Neptune.
Client dependency. Amazon’s documentation warns that applications using stored certificate bundles—JDBC truststores, Python certifi bundles, or OS-level keystores—must be updated manually or they will reject database connections.
Regional cutovers. AWS guidance recommends staging rotations region by region because enabling certificate rotation triggers brief failovers or reboots for Multi-AZ clusters.

Control alignment

SOC 2 CC6.7 / ISO/IEC 27001 Annex A.8.28. Maintain cryptographic key management inventories and change logs that document when each RDS instance adopted the 2024 certificates.
NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 SC-12 / SC-13. Demonstrate that database connections rely on current certificates and that revocation handling is monitored.
PCI DSS 4.0 Req. 4.2.1. Validate that cardholder workloads using Amazon Aurora or RDS enforce TLS 1.2+ handshakes with the new CA chain.

Detection and response priorities

Set CloudWatch alarms on ACMExpiredCertificate and RDS-EVENT-0142 notifications so rotation gaps trigger paging before the August cutover.
Instrument synthetic connection tests using the new certificate bundle for every data plane (JDBC, Python, Golang) and alert when any workload still references the 2019 trust anchor.
Capture failover metrics and application latency during certificate rotation maintenance windows to feed back into incident postmortems.

Enablement moves

Publish platform playbooks that map each database family (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) to the required driver versions and certificate bundle paths.
Schedule joint rehearsals with application teams so they validate connection strings against staging clusters using the new certificates before production rollout.
Document change tickets with before/after connection tests, CloudTrail evidence of certificate rotation, and rollback plans for auditors.

Sources

Zeph Tech keeps infrastructure leaders ahead of hyperscaler maintenance events so certificate transitions, failovers, and connection policy changes do not interrupt revenue workloads.